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Backing up and storing your backups are the most important keys to PC reliability. Some people think backup has to be dreary and difficult. In fact it can be pretty easy.
See the Wikipedia backup article for more.
In the early days of PCs, many times there'd be PC data important enough that it really had to be backed up, on a PC with nothing to back up with but 5¼-inch diskettes. That kind of backup really was a dreary and distasteful chore, sometimes complicated by partial backups; this may account for some people's attitudes about backup now.
Setup:
Once a day at an appropriate time, change backup disks. Safely store the one(s) not loaded.
After a few backups have run, try the acid test procedure below, once. If your system flunks the test, find out why and fix it. Down the road, if six months go by without any other restores, consider retesting. Replace your backup disks at appropriate intervals for the media type, or in any case immediately if you see any disk errors.
To test your backup system:
There's no point in making backups unless you know you can successfully use them to recover stuff. Most people end up implementing this test protocol on an unscheduled basis (grin) using a working file they need desperately. It's a lot less stressful with a dummy file.
If you run this test and pass, it will indicate three things:
There could still be problems with data directories not involved in the test being left out of the backups, if you're not doing whole-disk backups and your data structure is complicated. But if you don't pass, you'll know for sure there's a problem.
We have met the enemy
and he is us. (Pogo, 1971)
We all know people who never back up their files.
How important is the information on your computer? How bad would it be if all of it was gone, right this second? BAM, out go the lights, and it never boots again. What would happen to you?
Maybe you are basically a gamer, and about all you use it for besides playing games is free Web-mail and surfing the Internet. Web-mail is stored on their server, of course, so I guess if you're okay with the possibility of losing your Web bookmarks and saved games, maybe you don't need to back up.
If you're a kid, and the last paragraph is you except for homework, maybe you don't need to back up either. Mind losing your homework?
For most people, no backups plus a system crash equals some level of pain. The spectrum probably runs from losing bookmarks to cool Web resources that you can't find again after the crash, through the inconvenience of doing some work over, up to various scenarios of screwing up your career, getting sued, having people think you're an idiot, and other stuff nobody wants.
The good news: backing up a PC can be pretty user friendly now. See easiest possible backup above.
You have to have at least two sets of backup media. Suppose you only have one set, which you use every day, and the power goes out in the middle of a backup. At that point you have no backups. You need at least two sets so there's still an intact set in existence during a backup.
Two sets is the bare minimum, but more is better. You can rotate them, spread out the wear on the media, and you have more depth in case something evil happens to one set. You can also use multiple rotating backups to retrieve an earlier version of a file from several days before, if that's ever necessary.
Consider working out some system for rotating offsite storage of some of your backup sets. This can save you from scenarios where the whole office gets wiped out, i.e. fire/flood/theft.
If you're using a PC in a business setting, you should be able to justify a high-capacity backup drive. These days, depending mostly on how big a hard disk you have, you can usually get a drive of some sort for under $250, that has enough capacity to back up your complete disk—all programs and data—on one media cartridge. This has several benefits. Every backup is a full backup. You can have a hard disk wear out on you, replace it, restore from your latest backup, and in one step have all your programs back, with all configuration options properly set, plus all your documents and other data; your complete operating environment.
Also, you don't have to sit there and change floppy disks. You can set a backup going and go do something else ... lunch, for example. You can even rig things so that your daily backup happens late at night; then all you have to do is load a backup cartridge before you go home, and stow it away in the morning. You're more likely to actually run backups if you make them easy for yourself.
In fact, if you have a high-capacity backup drive, you can probably set things up so that your computer runs its backup unattended and then shuts itself down, all automatically, after you leave the office for the day.
See my backup media page for specifics on available types of backup systems.
If you're using a laptop, and you have an associate whose desktop system has a large backup drive, maybe you can connect to your associate's machine periodically to back up your laptop. This used to be done with slower parallel and serial ports, but there are cable adapters available now to temporarily connect two PCs using much faster USB ports.
If you can't get access to a high-capacity backup drive, or you can't get one yet, you may be stuck with backing up to diskettes. If you're in this situation, you'll want to back up only your documents and other data files. If you ever need to restore program files, you'll just have to re-install and re-configure the program.
Always buy preformatted diskettes. At one time all new diskettes were unformatted, then for a while you could buy either; now they only seem to stock preformatted. If you mess up and get Mac preformatted instead of IBM preformatted, don't panic: you can just reformat them. And yes, I did find this out the hard way.
If you want to back up just your data files, it helps to have all your data files in one place.
This is still a good idea even if you have a high-capacity backup drive. No matter what class of PC you have now, eventually you'll need to upgrade, and that typically requires re-installing and re-configuring some or all of your software. When that day comes, you're going to want to be able to back up and restore your data files separately. Of course, some people just kiss their old files goodbye and start over; but you can do better than that.
The easiest way to do this is to take advantage of the My Documents folder, the default Windows/Office document folder. If you do, you can just tell your backup program to back up everything under My Documents, and you're done.
C:--\--Batch
|--My Documents---\--Project1
| |--Project2
| |--Larry
| |--Moe
| |--Curly-----\--Contracts
| | |--Bids
| \--Charts \--Letters
|--Explorer
|--Office-----\--Access
| |--Excel
|--Windows \--Winword
etc.
You can divide things up in subfolders under My Documents by project, by user, by program, or however you like. All Microsoft Office programs and most Windows programs will default to saving and opening documents in My Documents, and any first level subfolders will also appear in the Save and Open dialogs.
What if you've been saving data files all over your disk, and you want to clean up your act? Well, you're in for some work, but it won't be too bad. To get ready, first make a list of all the directories your data files are in now. There are a couple of ways you can do that:
You'll probably end up with a list of directories looking something like this:
|
c:\curly c:\msoffice\excel c:\msoffice\excel\charts c:\msoffice\winword c:\msoffice\winword\larry c:\msoffice\winword\moe |
When you've got your list of directories, you're ready to move:
If you're running a recent version of Windows, especially of the NT/2000/XP line, you may need some help with this process.
You have two main choices for backup techniques:
| Backup with compression using backup software | If you back up using software and compression, you will need to make sure you can install the same backup software to restore from those archives; if you don't have access to the same software, you won't be able to restore. |
|---|---|
| "Straight copy" backup | Straight copy backups will generally require more room on the backup media, but you can access the backed-up files like you would any other drive, using Windows Explorer, folder windows, from the command line, or just using File Open from inside the application. |
What file types you have the most of can be a factor here. Database files often compress eight to one, so backing up databases with compression can be a big win. On the other hand, if you have lots of files that are already compressed, i.e. MP3 music files, JPG and GIF images, MPEG movies and the like, straight copy backups may not be that much bigger than compressed.
If you buy a high-capacity backup drive, it may come with backup software of some sort with on-the-fly compression. You can either use that, or look for commercial shrink-wrap backup software that supports your drive and media type. Current commercial backup software probably supports multiple types of backup devices, such as CD-R/RW, DVD±RW, IOmega Zip, tape etc. I'd be surprised if it doesn't also let you schedule backups during downtime.
If your situation is such that you can easily back up all your documents, or your entire disk, to your backup device without compression, you may want to consider using a straight copy backup. This can be accomplished with just a simple batch file using the DOS command XCOPY.
Here's a command-line batch file that will back up everything under My Documents, assuming F drive is the high-capacity backup device:
@echo off xcopy "c:\My Documents\*.*" f:\Backup\ /s type "c:\My Documents\_backup.dat" > "c:\My Documents\_backup.dat" exit |
This one backs up the whole C drive:
@echo off xcopy c:\*.* f:\Backup\ /s type "c:\My Documents\_backup.dat" > "c:\My Documents\_backup.dat" exit |
If you're running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, the path to your My Documents folder may be a bit longer than seen above, and you'd need to modify accordingly.
XCOPY's /s switch causes it to recurse subdirectories, that is, back up all subfolders under the location specified. You may or may not be able to use Windows Scheduler or another scheduling utility to schedule when that batch file runs.
Every so often I encounter someone with a half-bright idea: they decide to eliminate the middleman and save data files only to diskettes, instead of on the hard disk. This is not a good plan.
There's nothing especially wonderful or inherently safe about diskettes or even backup-drive media. Even CD/DVD optical media can get sat on, scratched, or left in a hot car and melted or something.
The basic idea of backing up is to have two copies, on different media (hard disk and backup) to greatly reduce the odds of a common disaster overtaking both copies.
In fact, having your files saved only on floppies is more risky than having them on the hard disk with no backups. Besides, we started putting hard disks in PC's in the first place because they're faster and bigger than floppies. You can save your work to a hard disk in a fraction of the time it takes to write to a floppy, or most backup media, which means you can save more often without significantly interrupting the flow of your work. So save your files to the hard disk and back them up to floppies, or (better) to the high-capacity format of your choice.
External and removable hard disks qualify as backup media because they are being handled, used, and stored differently from the system's primary hard disk (even though they might be the same model drive).
One might be tempted to save data files only to an external or removable hard disk. This might be okay on speed of saves while working, but it fails the "two copies" parameter. There's nothing wrong with saving data files primarily to an external or removable hard disk, especially if it's a project you are toting back and forth between two locations, but they still need to be backed up to something else.
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